Lucy Revill’s The Residents is a blog about daily life in Wellington that has morphed into a stylish, low-key coffee-table book featuring interviews and photographic portraits of 38 Wellingtonians. In this extract, Revill profiles Eboni Waitere, owner and executive director of Huia Publishers. The Residents features names like Monique Fiso and Jacinda Ardern, a bunch … Read more
Summer reissue: poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. First published 10 February 2020. Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members – click here to learn more about how you can support us from as … Read more
Poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. I spend two months with this book, following Witi Ihimaera’s journey, I see car tyres in country roads I see tears on lover’s faces, I feel the beating of the heart, as it strains against the western paradigm of heteronormativity. … Read more
Morgan Godfery tries to make sense of the last decade for Māori in te ao hurihuri, the changing world. Here he looks at the highs, the lows and the TBCs… Taika’s interesting world There are three roads out of Opotiki, the rural town where the Eastern Bay of Plenty becomes the East Coast. You can … Read more
New poetry by Wellington poet and artist Ana Iti. All the way to Te Rerenga Wairua Does the spirit intrinsically know what direction to travel to get to Hawaiki? Or Heaven? Is there some colonial idea of blood quantum that first has to be observed? Would the saliva of the intangible get processed by … Read more
Book of the Week: Jane Stafford reviews a vast, thought-provoking study of late colonial New Zealand, when European portrait artists romanticised Māori culture. I have long regarded Roger Blackley as a living taonga, an unfailing resource for anyone working in the field of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial culture. There is no enquiry too recondite, no … Read more
Nadine Anne Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) is one of six writers who have been selected for Te Papa Tupu 2018, a writing programme developed by the Māori Literature Trust and organised by Huia Publishers. We asked her to write about what it means for her as a Māori writer. In 2013 a friend rang to offer me … Read more
A new book of translated Māori verse joins Taika Waititi “in his calling out of language laziness”. So why were the authors ignored by a literary festival looking for new voices? An essay by the book’s co-editor, Vana Manasiadis. Tātai Whetū means constellation of stars. It also means tongue twister. In Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women … Read more
All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books celebrates the rich, fascinating history of New Zealand literature. Today: Scott Hamilton Hamilton notices something missing in the long, feverish construction of New Zealand literature – the rest of the Pacific. Near the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about the reappearance of the … Read more
Brannavan Gnanalingam writes about the overwhelming whiteness of English literature as taught in New Zealand – and throws down a challenge to the gatekeepers, including the Spinoff. UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph caused a stir in October with a front page story about a black Cambridge student who had “force[d] Cambridge to drop white authors”. The Telegraph‘s … Read more
Maraea Rakuraku is an award-winning playwright whose latest work is being presented in Te Pou’s Kōanga Festival in September. Sam Brooks talked to her about history, playwriting and cultural commentary. Kōanga Festival is a two and a half week festival (September 1 – 17) presented by Te Pou, Auckland’s Home of Māori Theatre, consisting of … Read more
Paula Morris responds to the ‘glorious, painful, sharp and funny’ anthology of Māori writing, Black Marks on a White Page. Nobody likes a Māori writer. First of all, nobody knows who we are. Nobody knows the names of any writers, apart from the ones with movies [see: Frame, Ihimaera, Duff, Wendt]. This is really our … Read more